The Death of E-Readers
Back in May of 2004 Northern Express ran my column
“Electric Ink” about a new development in technology. In the time since we have
seen the Kindle, Nook and other e-readers have come out using that
energy-saving technology. The charge on a plain vanilla Kindle can last a
month! Now the e-readers are already on the brink of extinction.
The development of new technology seems to be
progressing more and more quickly. Hardly anyone any more remembers eight track
tape. That was replaced by cassettes, but now those are hard to find. You can’t
find a cassette player now unless it is bundled with a CD player. Want one? Try
the Goodwill store.
Beta video recorders disappeared with the advent of
VHS. Then VHS was replaced by DVD, and now Blue ray is taking over as the next
step. Blockbuster video has gone out of business, thanks to Netflix and
streaming video on demand. There’s 3d TV and even 4d, whatever that is.
Amazon.com, Kindle maker of the first truly mass
marketed electronic book reader after numerous others like the Hamilton Bookman
and Rocket Reader failed, is trying to compete with the Apple I-pad. Amazon has
progressed from the basic Kindle, to the Kindle white which is lit for reading
in the dark, and the Kindle Fire which incorporates some of the features of the
I-pad.
Tablets are fast overtaking tower PCs and can do almost
as much as laptops. The I-pad is pricy, though, at around $400. I just bought a
marked down Prestige tablet the same size as my 3g Kindle for $50, free shipping.
This is made possible by the ever more compact
memory storage.
When computers first were developed there was no
memory storage. Shut off, those big main frames forgot everything that wasn’t
hard wired into the system. Then we got tape storage of data. Early computers
came with little tape cassettes to store memory. Major office computers used
spooled tape. Then we got disks. Spell check software for my first computer, a
64k CMP system, was purchased on an 8 inch floppy disk and had to be converted
to the then standard 5 inch floppy. Those were replaced by the 1.2 megabyte 3 ½
in disks, and now PCs no longer come with drives to read those, either.
I paid $300 to have a 40 meg hard drive installed on
my Compaq luggable PC. Imagine.
The advent of the flash drive changed that, too. You
can now buy a 64 gigabyte flash drive that simply plus into a USB port. That’s
more memory than my replacement 40 gig hard drive! It’s that kind of memory
storage that made the Prestige baby tablet possible. It is a flash drive
system, no spinning mechanical hard drive to slow down data access. Tablets
today come with 8 or16 gigabytes of storage.
Survival depends on versatility. When I upload a
text for an Amason.com ebook I can preview how it will look on the screen of a
Kindle, on an I-pad, and even a phone! Thanks goodness the books can be read on
all those platforms. Otherwise my books would be as accessible as the Rosetta
stone which took twenty-four years to decipher. I joke that I have the secret
of eternal life on my 8 track tape player.
Does anyone remember the Linier dedicated word
processor? It was quickly replaced by the PC with its variety of off the shelf
software.
Like the cassette player, it seems obvious that
e-readers like the Kindle and Nook, surpassed by the more versatile tablets,
will soon be obsolete. My Kindle cost nearly $200. My tablet cost $50. Now all
I have to do with my obsolete brain is figure out how to use it (ambiguity
intended). You have to keep running faster and faster just to keep up. Wish me
luck.
